of archaeological research is to try to reconstruct the whole culture from top to bottom, from the economy and technology up to the religion. the problem is that what we find in the field as data is primarily information on technology, on the material culture. you find buildings and pot shards and stone tools and things like that. so how do you move from that data to the organization of society and then to their religion and these other aspects of culture ? and there is only one way to do that. and that is to go to living populations, living cultures that are being studied by ethnographers, by our colleagues in cultural anthropology, and use them as analogies. keach: in the 1970s, anthropologists documented a society called the kawelka in the highlan of papua new guinea. the kawelka society numbers about 1,000. they could be either a tribe or a chiefdom, because the population limits defining social types are not fixed. here in the highlands, people raise sweet potatoes and pigs. like the first residents of copan, no one here has acquired great individual wealth. but men like ongka can acq